Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

NOTEBOOK “ν”

ENGELS,INTERNATIONAL ARTICLES FROM THE“VOLKSSTAAT”

Friedrich Engels,International Articles from the “Volksstaat”(1871-75), Berlin, 1894.

PREFACE, 1894

“THE BAKUNINISTS AT WORK”

“A POLISH PROCLAMATION’’

Ibidem “A Polish Proclamation” (June 11, 1874).

...“Besides, after the Napoleonic wars, Russia took the lion’s share of the former Prussian and Austro-Polish provinces and openly came forward as the arbiter of Europe, a role she continued to play until 1853.... During the years of revolution, the suppression of Hungary by Russian troops was as decisive a development for Eastern and Central Europe as the June battles in Paris were for the West.... Russian domination in Europe ushered in the rule of reaction. The Crimean War freed the West and Austria from the insolence of the tsar.... We have seen above that the Russian army serves as the pretext for and mainstay of all European militarism.... It was only because the Russian army prevented Austria from siding with France in 1870 that Prussia was able to defeat France and consummate the Prusso-German military monarchy” (38)....

The talk about the “essentially aristocratic” character of the Polish movement is “silly”.

The Polish aristocracy sides more and more with Russia, in order to reunite Poland, even if under Russian rule; the revolutionary masses reply by offering an alliance with the German Workers’ Party and by fighting in the ranks of the International” (39).

“ON SOCIAL RELATIONS IN RUSSIA”

“On Social Relations in Russia” (1875).

...“The big bourgeoisie of Petersburg, Moscow, Odessa: which has developed with unheard-of rapidity during the last decade, chiefly due to the railways ... the entire Russian large-scale industry, which exists only thanks to ... protective tariffs,—have all these important and rapidly growing elements of the population no interest in the existence of the Russian state?” ... (p. 52) (against Tkachov).

A postscript (1894)—to the article “On Social Relations in Russia”—ends with this sentence:

“It [the revolution in Russia] will not only rescue the great mass of the nation, the peasants, from the isolation of their villages, which constitute their ‘mir’, their world, and lead them on to the big stage, where they will get to know the outside world and thereby themselves, their own position, and the means of salvation from their present state of want, but it will also give a new impetus and new, better conditions of struggle to the workers’ movement of the West, and hasten the victory of the modern industrial proletariat, without which present-day Russia cannot find her way, whether through the village commune or through capitalism, to a socialist transformation of society” (p. 72).

[1]Social-Democrat—Ed.